Trump: Anticlimactic, But Entertaining

Donald Trump made his big announcement this morning, in the form of a YouTube video. It turns out he doesn’t have anything at all on President Obama; nothing, that is, except a proposition: he offers to make a donation of $5 million to a charity of Obama’s choice if Obama will release his college and passport records, including applications:

It’s pretty funny, but it won’t lead to anything. What is going on here is that many people believe Obama applied to college (either Occidental or Columbia, or both) as a foreign student from Kenya, and received preferential treatment or scholarship aid on that basis. This is pure speculation, but I suspect it may be correct. It is consistent with Obama having stated in his literary bio for many years that he was born in Kenya, and it explains why Obama’s college records are such a closely-guarded secret. Be that as it may, there is zero chance that Obama will do anything in response to Trump’s offer, except perhaps to ridicule it so as to revive the “birther” meme. Obama won’t mention, of course, that he himself was the original birther.

Gloria Allred’s supposed bombshell, on the other hand, turned out to be a total dud. She wants to unseal testimony in a decades-old divorce case–an old Obama specialty!–involving a former CEO of Staples. Apparently Mitt Romney testified in a deposition about the value of certain stock (presumably Staples) owned by the company’s CEO. At a hearing in Massachusetts this morning, Romney’s lawyer did not object to his testimony being made public.